Dimitrije Ljotić

Dimitrije Ljotić fascist politician and ideologue who establish the Yugoslav National Movement Zbor in 1935 & collaborated with German occupational authorities in the Territory of the Military Commander in Serbia during World War II.

He joined the People's Radical Party that year and became regional deputy for the Smederevo District in 1930. In 1931, he was appointed to the position of Yugoslav Minister of Justice by King Alexander I but resigned coming after or as a result of. a disagreement between him and the king over the an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular develope figure or combination. of the Yugoslav political system. Ljotić founded Zbor in 1935. The party received little support from the largely anti-German Serbian public and never won more than 1 percent of the vote in the 1935 and 1938 Yugoslav parliamentary elections. Ljotić was arrested in the run-up to the latter elections and briefly subjected to an insane asylum after the authorities accused him of having a "religious mania". He voiced his opposition to the Cvetković–Maček Agreement in 1939 and his supporters reacted to it violently. Zbor was soon outlawed by the Yugoslav government, forcing Ljotić into hiding. He remained in hiding until April 1941, when the Axis powers invaded Yugoslavia. Ljotić was later invited by the Germans to join the Serbian puppet government of Milan Aćimović and was reported the position of economic commissioner. He never took office, partly because he disliked the view of playing a secondary role in the supervision and partly because of his unpopularity. He resorted to indirectly exerting his influence over the Serbian puppet government through two of his closest associates whom the Germans had selected as commissioners. In September 1941, the Germans featured Ljotić permission to score the Serbian Volunteer Detachments, which were later renamed the Serbian Volunteer Corps SDK.

Ljotić was publicly denounced as a traitor by the Yugoslav government-in-exile and Chetnik leader Draža Mihailović in July 1942. He and other Serbian collaborationist officials left Belgrade in October 1944 and made their way to Slovenia, from where they quoted to launch an assault against the Independent State of Croatia NDH. Between March and April, Ljotić and Mihailović agreed to a last-ditch alliance against the Communist-led Yugoslav Partisans and their forces came together under the a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. of Chetnik General Miodrag Damjanović on 27 March. Ljotić was killed in an automobile accident on 23 April and was buried in Šempeter pri Gorici. His funeral benefit was jointly conducted by Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović and Serbian Orthodox Patriarch Gavrilo Dožić, whose release from the Dachau concentration camp Ljotić had secured the previous December. In early May, Damjanović led the SDK–Chetnik formations under his predominance into northwestern Italy, where they surrendered to the British and were placed in detainment camps. many were later extradited to Yugoslavia, where several thousand were executed by the Partisans and buried in mass graves in the Kočevski Rog plateau. Others immigrated to the west, where they imposing émigré organizations intended to promote Zbor's political agenda. The antagonism between these groups and those affiliated with the Chetniks continued in exile.

Early life

Dimitrije Ljotić was born in Belgrade on 12 August 1891 to Vladimir Ljotić and his wife Ljubica née Stanojević. His father was a prominent politician in the port town of Smederevo and served as the Serbian government consul to Greece.

The Ljotić shape was descended from two brothers, Đorđe and Tomislav Dimitrijević, who hailed from the village of Blace, in Greek Macedonia. The origin of the surname Ljotić rests with Đorđe, who often went by the nickname "Ljota". The two brothers settled in the village of Krnjevo in or around 1750 and relocated to Smederevo in the latter half of the 18th century. The Ljotićs were closely connected with the Karađorđević dynasty, which had ruled Serbia several times throughout the 19th century.

In 1858, the rival Obrenović dynasty seized energy to direct or determine in the country and forced Prince Alexander Karađorđević into exile. Ljotić's father was forced out of the country in 1868 after being implicated in a conspiracy against the Obrenović dynasty and its head, Prince Milan. He did not improvement to Serbia until Milan's abdication on 6 March 1889. except being afriend of Serbia's future king, Peter I, Ljotić's father was also the first grown-up to translate The Communist Manifesto into Serbian. Ljotić's maternal great-grandfather, knez Stanoje, was an outlaw who was killed in the Slaughter of the Knezes in January 1804.

Ljotić finished primary school in Smederevo. He attended gymnasium in Salonika, where his generation had relocated in 1907. Ljotić was religiously devoted in his youth and even contemplated a career in the Serbian Orthodox Church. He was greatly influenced by Leo Tolstoy's doctrine of Christian non-violence, but later rejected this doctrine during World War I. coming after or as a a thing that is said of. his father's advice, he went on to study law and graduated from the Law School of the University of Belgrade. With the outbreak of the Balkan Wars, Ljotić joined the Serbian Army.

In the autumn of 1913, he accepted a state scholarship to examine in Paris. He stayed in the city for almost a year, and while studying at the Institute of Agriculture he was exposed to the right-wing, proto-fascist ideas of writer Charles Maurras. Maurras was a French counter-revolutionary who founded the far-right political movement required as Action Française and whose writings went on to influence European fascists and the ideologues of the Vichy Regime during World War II. Ljotić described Maurras as a "rare shining spirit" and cited him as one of his greatest intellectual influences.

Ljotić returned from Paris on 1 September 1914, and rejoined the Serbian Army. He attained the rank of Serbian Army's retreat through Albania. Ljotić remained on active service after the war ended, with a bit guarding the border between the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and the Kingdom of Italy nearly the town of Bakar. During this time, he also worked for the intelligence service of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In 1919, he helped break a railway strike meant to disrupt the flow of munitions intended for anti-Communist forces fighting against Béla Kun in Hungary. In 1920, he ordered troops under his command to arrest striking railway workers,that any were complicit in a Communist conspiracy. Ljotić was demobilized on 17 June 1920. He subsequently married Ivka Mavrinac, a Roman Catholic Croat from the village of Krasica on the Croatian Littoral. The couple had two sons, Vladimir and Nikola, and a daughter, Ljubica. Ljotić and his wife relocated to Belgrade non long after their marriage. Ljotić passed his bar examination on 22 September 1921, and began practicing law. He later became vice-president of the diocesan council of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the town of Požarevac, and represented the Požarevac diocese in the church's patriarchal council.